Chapter 3 - State of the Arts

Summary

This chapter explores the prominence of the arts and their cognate vocations in near-future fiction, and how they act as a way of scaling up the domestic near future to appease the spatial demands of planetary ecological emergency. In Arcadia by Lauren Groff (2013), art acts like myth and climate events in Chapters 1–2, shrinking climate change to the scale of the body. However, in The History of Bees by Maja Lunde (2015) and 10:04 by Ben Lerner (2015), the artwork models the social totality, though this entails both an authoritarian overwriting of individual identity and the desertion of narrative and history. Such a totality suggests Romantic theorisations of the symbol, situating the domestic near future in a literary history in which the symbol has been a compensatory device for a revolutionary history that has painfully faltered. Blade Runner 2049 (dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2017) both provides a glimpse of this revolutionary dynamic and an exemplary desertion of it, as it moves away from an opening centred on latent class solidarity and revolution to become a quest adventure to locate the domestic near future, vested in an artist and their parent–child relationship.